The Antitrust Doctrine We’ve Seen Over the Last 40 Years Simply Does Not Match the Lived Experience of People

By: Asher Shechter (Pro Market)

Last month, two Federal Reserve economists, Isabel Cairó and Jae Sim, published a study that showed how many of the negative trends that have plagued the US economy in the past four decades—the decline of the labor share and the rise of the profit share, the rise of income and wealth inequalities, as well as financial instability resulting from rising household leverage—may have been generated by the increase in market power in both product and labor markets.

The Fed paper is just the latest in a long—and still growing—series of academic studies that document the effects of concentration and market power on the American economy.

In addition to this growing literature, the last four years have seen a number of influential books that discuss the rise of monopoly capitalism in America, the forgotten legacy of American antimonopoly, the risk that an increasingly concentrated global economy marked by historic levels of inequality and political power poses for liberal democracies (and history’s hard-earned lessons about the relationship between authoritarianism and monopoly power), and how Europe came to be better than the US at free markets.

While rich in data and figures, what academic and policy discussions often miss is the effect that monopoly power can have on people’s day-to-day lives. Enter Monopolized, an engrossing new book by investigative journalist David Dayen that seeks to document—through interviews and case studies—how the concentration of economic power pervades every corner of American life.

Monopolized is jam-packed with research and policy discussions but, as Hal Singer recently noted in his review of the book, the heart of Dayen’s book is the personal accounts of ordinary Americans—airline passengers, hospital patients, farmers, and small business owners—attempting to achieve a slice of the American dream and facing insurmountable barriers in the form of unaccountable private monopolies. It is, as Dayen recently put it, “a travelogue of monopoly.”

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